Friday, July 22, 2005

Democrats -- still living in the past

The Captain points to Anita Hills' attack on Roberts because he is a white male, rather than a woman or a minority (and the Captain appropriately points out Hills' efforts to derail the appointment of one of those minority justices she now craves). What I found so interesting was that Hill claims that Rogers' credentials (Harvard College, Harvard Law, Supreme Court clerkship, etc.), set the bar too high for women and minorities. As Hill says:

Had these "extraordinary" credentials set the standard for judicial nominations in 1982, Sandra Day O'Connor would never have been appointed. She never clerked. She never worked for a president. She never served as a federal judge.
Ideology notwithstanding, even Circuit Judge Edith Clement, whose name surfaced as the front-runner prior to Bush's official announcement, would not survive this standard, despite the fact that she has more judicial experience than Roberts. The first Latino U.S. attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, was also rumored to be a potential nominee. But like O'Connor's, his resume is missing a clerkship and his judicial experience was state, not federal.

Stop and think about this. First of all, O'Connor graduated at or near the top of her class at Stanford Law, so she wasn't chopped liver. Some, indeed, would say that Harvard is not as good as Stanford (I'd personally rank Yale Law at the top, which is gracious of me, since I didn't go there). More significantly, she didn't do all the fancy clerkships and jump into partnerships at major law firms because when O'Connor graduated in the 1950s, those opportunities were not open to women attorneys. It would, therefore, have been grossly unfair in the 1980s to expect those credentials from female (or minority) Supreme Court candidates of O'Connor's generation.
However, that was then, this is now. Women and minorities can and do attend the top rated law schools. Women and minorities now can, and do, get Supreme Court and Appellate Court clerkships. Women and minorities can and do work at major law firms, and they can and do become partners at those law firms. It is an insult to assert in the year 2005 that the standards for women and minorities should be set lower, simply because the standard had to be set lower to enable the first generation of women and minorities to get onto the Court.
This weird, time-warp argument shouldn't actually surprise me as much as it does. I've blogged before about the Demos peculiar obsession with basing their public policies on some foul smelling past they can't seem to shake. Their candidate lost the White House because he ran his campaign based on Vietnam. They're losing the abortion debate, because they're arguments are rooted in the sad, bad 1950s and before, when the stigma for out of wedlock pregnancies was enough to drive women to death. They're still fighting the bilingual battle, long after it was shown to rob children of a chance at an education. Until this party gets out of the past, it will have nothing to give to the future.